With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, the hearts of many Americans begin to contemplate that elusive emotion called love.

It is elusive in our day because it seems to be a fickle thing with people falling into it and heading for the altar, and then out of it and rushing to the divorce court. Society even perpetuates the mystique by implying that love needs to be proven yearly, hence the heart-shaped boxes on store shelves found only during this season.

But what is love, anyway? What is its essence? By essence, what I am asking is have you ever thought about what is the ultimate nature of love; what is the root from which it springs? It is not sex, contrary to what many want to believe. While sex might be one expression of the love between a husband and a wife, it is plain that genuine love is far more often found outside of the marriage bed than from within.

To understand what the Bible teaches about love’s essence, let us first consider what is its opposite: selfishness. While many of you will vehemently object and assert that it is hatred, this just simply is not what the Bible says. Hatred is simply one of many manifestations of selfishness.

In Matthew 22, when Jesus was asked about the great commandment in the law, he replied, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.”

And then he took the occasion to give the second and great commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” And then he concluded by saying, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Properly understood, what he is saying here is that the entire Old Testament is about loving God and our neighbors. To this end were the Ten Commandments written — the first four teaching how to love God and the second six how to love our neighbors.

The problem comes in loving our neighbor as we ought. Jesus said “as thyself.” For most people, the vast majority in fact, they have only their own best interests at heart. Their care or love for others only begins once their own self has been taken care of. Real love begins when you get your self out of the way. Real love is where you care for others the way you care for yourself, not how you would have them treat you.

The essence of love, then, is selflessness.

This is the essence that God demonstrated in loving the world. John 3 says, “For God so loved the world that he gave ...”

This same essence is expressed in Romans 5 of Christ towards his enemies, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

And it is this same essence that is expected of us toward others when Paul says in Philippians, “... in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.” You cannot even begin to love until you are willing to lay aside your own self in favor of others.

And when it comes to marriage, it is this same love that will keep the embers burning long into old age. While it is important for wives to have this love towards their husbands, in Ephesians 5 Paul lays the emphasis on husbands: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it. ... So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church.”

Isn’t God so true? Look around and find if you can a man who won’t buy his flesh something from time to time. I mean, who doesn’t like a new car or truck to take the burden off his feet? Or a nice set of clothes, or four-wheeler or whatever? But then look around, out of all these, and tell me how many will take just as good a care of their wives. When the Bible says, “so ought men to love,” it is because not all of them do.

Husbands, don’t you think your wives know if you really love them? Do you really think that a box of candy and a card one day a year is going to make up for the other 364?

While you cannot change the past, you can change the way you love your wife each and every day from here on out.

Ron Hamman is pastor of Independent Baptist Church of Wasilla; contact him at 357-4229 or rghamman@mtaonline.net.